As work from home (WFH) gains ground following the outbreak of Covid-19, home broadband users are upgrading to higher bandwidth speeds as operators gear up to support an expected surge in data traffic.
“Home broadband customers are now upgrading to faster speeds and larger quota plans to support work from home and study for home needs. Airtel’s B2B customers are utilising 4G dongles, home fibre connections and larger enterprise bandwidths, which are all being serviced smoothly,” Bharti Airtel Chief Technology Officer Randeep Sekhon told BusinessLine .
“On the mobile network side, we are seeing a shift in traffic hotspots and peak usage hours and are geared to meet this demand,” he added.
Managing networks
The company has activated distributed command centres to monitor and manage networks from different locations in case any geography is not accessible for some time. Our network partners have also activated Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and are fully geared to meet any situation.
READ THE STORY: BSNL to offer free broadband to enable WFH
Airtel’s networks are in BCP mode and fully prepared to support any exigency. Its mobile, fixed broadband, DTH and fibre networks are fully geared to serve customers in the emerging scenario.
The company has also activated distributed command centres to monitor and manage networks from different locations.
Free broadband
On its part, State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) is offering free broadband across the country for a month (from March 20) to enable customers to work from home.
The service is being provided to users who have BSNL landline but do not have broadband. The users can utilise this service to work from home, study from home, buy groceries online from home or anything that can minimise the need to go outdoor for availing themselves of essential needs, BSNL Director (Consumer Fixed Access) Vivek Banzal said.
BSNL is also offering its virtual private network (VPN) services to corporates to enable work from home service.
Vodafone Idea also confirmed that the company has been registering an increase in usage of Internet bandwidth as companies have enabled WFH for its staff.
The telecom companies, however, declined to provide the data of rise in Internet traffic immediately.
India has registered a slight increase in broadband download speeds between the weeks of March 2 and March 9, while mobile download speed remained flat, according to an Ookla study.
The mean fixed broadband download speed stood at 40 MBPS, the broadband testing company said.
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